A new innovation that will transform the way we produce meat. No killing of animals. Meat is produced from cells. No need for factories, slaughter houses, the beef industry, cattle, etc … and those Vegans who don’t eat meat because it includes killing of animals, will now be able to eat it.
What’s your opinion?
I’m omnivore, I’ll rather go vegetarian than to eat this “meat” if this is the only way to have animal protein. The problem: you don’t know how safe this is until many years later.
I have no interest whatsoever in eating meat produced in a laboratory.
Nor do I care in the slightest what vegans/vegetarians may or may not choose to eat. Entirely a matter for them.
Silly 
Stems cells are currently used to cure disease, create organs, so I, personally, have no problem with having it put in my body through my mouth, as opposed to it being put in my body via implantation of an organ.
It seems to me (and studies so far) that it will be much safer than meat that is brought to our tables from the current meat industry with antibiotics, hormones and diseases (mad cow just being one).
I believe that it is not only not silly, but the future.
But it is always exciting to hear what others think.
It would put a lot of farmers and ranchers out of work.
Sounds like a stupid idea to me.
Okay. I’ll give a more serious answer. As a person with advanced kidney disease, fresh food is my best medicine. That includes meat as something that’s necessary, at least according to my nephrologist, because of protein requirements. At this point I’m my life I’m not willing to be an experiment to benefit society. Besides, I love bbq.
So, game over for me.
I agree about the experiment phase. I would only eat it after all experiments are conducted and completed. Same with all stem cell transplants. However, I think you would be able to bbq it. It is after all… meat - just cut from a muscle that was created from the cow’s stem cells rather cutting it out of a dead cow (not that I have a problem with that either)
I agree with the latter portion of your post. The reason I referred to vegans is that it will be somewhat funny. However, I personally don’t care if the meat was cut out of the animal or grown by its cells. Meat is meat.
I truly think we will all be eating this way in the future. However, I too would wait until it is proven safe.
Animals will still exist and someone will have to raise them. They just won’t be slaughtered. Slaughterhouse workers will be out of work.
I’m 100% behind it! I’ve always said that if I had more self-control and princeples, I’d be a vegetarian, but the closest I come is to relegate meat to condiment status in perhaps half my cooking. I enjoy Impossible Meat as well. I am astounded by the rapidity of advances in food science. It’s not that long ago that the regrettably short-lived sitcom, Better Off Ted, had two of its lab nerds cloning a lump of beef, which they called “Blobby”. I’ll be at the head of the line when the first Blobby King opens!
That is not how raising cattle works. Ranchers don’t raise cattle if there is no market. Farmers don’t grow feed if there isn’t any cattle that is going to be eating it. Animals that aren’t sent to a slaughterhouse aren’t going to live to a nice old age. They would be put down, rather than fed, because it costs a lot to feed and raise cattle.
Businesses selling seeds, fertilizer, pesticide for the feed would be affected. So would the people selling and fixing tractors, the agricultural vets. The people building and fixing barns and troughs. The people fixing fences to keep cattle in. The people selling the sperm for artificial insemination of cows, pigs, etc would be affected by lab grown meat.
The slaughterhouse staff are only one small group of the people who are involved in getting meat to your table.
The jobs vs technology debate has been going on for hundreds of years and while it always was and always will be a sensitive issue, if the technology improves our lives it will always take preference. It was the same during the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution and the informational revolution. The way I see it, looking back, while jobs were lost during each of these eras, in the end, new jobs were created.
The reason I started the thread was because I am extremely interested in technology and this particular innovation fascinates me and I wanted to hear what others think. You think it is a stupid idea, as it seems do others and I thank you for voicing your opinion, even though I disagree.
Technology has been improving cattle raising methods for centuries.
Unfortunately, the focus on the bottom line creates more problems it seems.
We wouldn’t have as many problems if people weren’t so cheap and businesses weren’t so greedy.
It’s certainly an interesting idea, and - assuming I like it - I myself would have no objections to eating it as long as it “tests OK” as far as it’s composition/chemical/biochemical constituents.
As for the processes that create it, that’s potentially another set of issues altogether. Which is how I feel about GMOs (and for that matter, “organic” food). Unlike - or so I gather - the majority of its opponents (at least the vocal ones, on the Web) I have zero concerns about GMO foods’ potential detrimental impact on my health, and 45+ years since it’s been any sort of A Thing, I’ve yet to see any concrete evidence (significant or otherwise) that organic food is in fact any healthier to eat than reasonably-regulated conventional crops - my concerns/opinions about those things relate entirely to their long-term impact on the environment. (Which, much like humans’ contribution to climate change, we won’t know for decades (or longer), by which time, any hope of “stopping” any serious problems will be ancient history and the best we’ll be able to do (if we’re willing to do it even then) is avoid making the situation worse.
And unlike GMO agricultural, for example, it superficially seems much more possible to control any environmental impact (even in the broadest sense) because presumably it would all be done “indoors”, in controlled environments. (Of course that assumes adequate regulation, but what human activity doesn’t have the potential to wreak havoc on the environment if it’s not regulated?) I mean, I don’t imagine we’ll have little “artificially culture pork chops” gamboling about in fields, possibly spreading their laboratory-rearranged genomes or other bits freely into the ecosphere…
I also frankly like the idea of being able to “eat animals and have them too” (even if it means “having” many fewer of them), I have no vested interest in killing things for food. I’m not so unhappy about it that I’m vegetarian, but I’d be delighted to be able to “eat meat” without raising animals to be killed for it.
As for putting a relatively small number of people (in the scheme of the total population of workers in the world), um, yeah, well, times change, jobs change. In the very short term, I suppose some animals might be “put down”, but more likely the “last of their kind” would be “slaughtered for meat” just like their forebears (and there would no doubt be a continuing niche market for purists, able and willing to pay for their purism, just as the case is now, for some/other foods and other “luxury” goods), and farmers would stop breeding animals for food. Which, frankly, would be fine by me. I see no logical imperative, much less a moral one, in continuing to breed animals for food for its own sake…
I get the feeling some of you don’t know any farmers.
Personally, no? I live in NYC, not many farmers hereabouts, and while I chat with greenmarket farmers, I wouldn’t calling that “knowing them”. (Not that the vast majority of them, with tiny, “niche” product farms that couldn’t feed a square city block if their lives depended on it - are representative of mainstream agriculture anyway.) But so what?
Did/do you object to /refuse to patronize the Internet versions of traditional print/audio/video media because it put thousands of workers (ignoring authors) out of work? I can’t cite statistics, but I’d be very, very surprised if farmers constitute a larger percentage of any developed country’s work force than those employees did. Did you object when typesetters (the “real”, original sort) were put out of work in the 1970s, when computerized typesetting machines made it economically “rational” to switch to the more 'efficient" (meaning human-labor-saving) machine-based typesetting? Do you refuse to buy, use, or wear synthetic textiles because they put cotton, flax, and sheep farmers out of business (not to mention consuming non-renewable resources when perfectly good, and many cases, superior renewable versions existed)? And those are just a couple of very recent examples. Go back another couple of decades and the number of “displaced workers” in countless industries increases, if maybe not geometrically, at least dramatically… At least in this case, the total number of jobs displaced would be tiny relative to the overall working population, unlike in many other similar cases… (given the that jobs “displaced” would only be those from raising to slaughtering the animals - the rest of the distribution chain would remain more or less intact, just “distributing” a different version of the original product…
Indeed I did. My trade union (organising in the public sector) gave a lot of support to striking print workers
